woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131The last decade of artistic practice in Canada has been marked by a grow-ing interest in Renaissance themes and subjects, including cabinets of curiosity, rogue taxidermy, vanitas <\/em>still lifes, grotesque hybrids, and carni-valesque d\u00e9cor and attire. <\/pre>\n\n\n\nRecently on display at Occurrence, Jean-Jacques Ringuette\u2019s photographs are a noteworthy example of this trend. An unset-tling exhibition, Figures de la mascarade <\/em>ou La vie passionnante de F\u00e9licien <\/em>combines contemporary aesthetic strategies with historical references to Medieval and Renaissance fools and tragic clowns, as well as Tarot cards, commedia dell\u2019arte, carnival, and even the passion of Christ. The result is a somewhat off-putting exhibition, especially for a viewer unfamiliar with the historical precedents for these images. Without this context, many of the photographs verge on offensive. Les joyeux atermoiements du fatum<\/em>, for instance, depicts the artist\u2019s clown alias\u2014F\u00e9licien\u2014diapered, palsied, and sitting in a wheelchair surrounded by party favours, while in Je ne connais pas cet homme <\/em>he vulgarly masquerades as an obese, disabled woman. <\/p>\n\n\n\n
Although some of Ringuette\u2019s images lack finesse, taken as a whole the exhibition is quite interesting. Perhaps its most valuable quality is an overarching strangeness rooted in a tension between humour and pathos, subtlety and exaggeration. In the accompanying catalogue essay, Penny Cousineau-Levine writes convincingly about the work\u2019s relationship to concepts of the grotesque, carnivalesque, and abject defined by theor-ists such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva. She reminds us that the modus operandi of a grotesque universe such as F\u00e9licien\u2019s is to overturn \u201centrenched norms of sobriety, propriety and gender-appropriate behav-iour.\u201d In Ringuette\u2019s work, this is achieved through a tension of opposites in which avatars of childhood and senility, innocence and corruption, comedy and suffering are intermingled and confused. For example, a series of photographs based on carnival cutouts (also sometimes called comic foregrounds) twists the whimsical practice of sticking one\u2019s head through a hole in a painted wooden fa\u00e7ade into a macabre meditation on the intimate connection between birth and death, decay and regeneration. In these photographs, F\u00e9licien\u2019s clown face replaces the head of a teddy bear stuck to a piece of plywood. In each image, the bear\u2019s body assumes a different foolish or abject pose: slipping on a banana peel, wetting itself with greenish urine, sitting atop a pile of refuse, or losing control of its bowels. As with the rest of the exhibition, these are not the kind of images one spontaneously \u201cloves.\u201d Instead, their bizarre and confusing perversity gives one pause. In the current climate of easily digested, corporate- sponsored \u201chipness,\u201d creating this kind of uncertainty in the viewer is no small achievement. <\/p>\n